Specialist units across England and Wales that take a public health approach to youth violence have prevented an estimated 3,220 hospital admissions for violent injury since they were introduced in 2018.
But they will only match the radical change achieved by the pioneering Scottish violence reduction unit (VRU) that inspired them if the government commits to long-term funding and support.
These are the conclusions of the most comprehensive survey to date of youth violence prevention in the UK, which also highlights that adults must catch up with new ways that online youth violence spills on to the streets.
With rates of serious violence and knife crime increasing across the whole of England and Wales, the work of VRUs is all the more important in the years ahead, says Keir Irwin-Rogers, senior lecturer in criminology at the Open University. He is completing a briefing paper based on interviews with the heads of the 19 regional units that were introduced under the Conservatives after Labour’s Sadiq Khan first adopted the policy as London mayor in 2018.
All units were significantly informed by the work of the UK’s original VRU, set up in Glasgow in 2005 to tackle the city’s deeply rooted knife culture. That gained international renown for treating violence as a public health crisis, an approach credited with dramatically reducing deaths in Scotland.
“While VRUs in England and Wales are doing some great work, they have faced significant challenges in pursuing long-term prevention strategies,” says Irwin-Rogers. “Short-term funding settlements, the volatility of UK politics, and short-term evaluation metrics, all make it hard to plan and invest in long-term work that gets to the root causes of violence.”
The briefing paper, seen by the Guardian, concludes that the new VRUs have been highly successful in enhancing multi-agency collaboration in their local areas and made concerted efforts to listen to young people and communities.
Irwin-Rogers says: “But for VRUs to succeed in future years, what they really need is long-term support and funding commitments, and the space and time to focus on root causes and long-term prevention – in other words, conditions similar to those that were integral to the success of the Scottish VRU.”
The interviews are part of a three-year study of violence reduction in the UK, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and lead by Alistair Fraser, criminology chair at the University of Glasgow, which last month also reported on emerging trends around violence and the digital world.
Fraser explains that, in the aftermath of Covid restrictions and with continuing cuts to local services, physical spaces where activities and support had been organised for young people were severely affected.
He says: “As youth services have closed, young people are drawn more to digital spaces: there is no clear line between the online and the offline. But young people and youth workers told us [of] a fear bubbling up around the part technology can play in today’s forms of violence.”
As one young person told the research team: “You start arguing over Snapchat, two full schemes going at it … telling them you’re going to kill them and all that … it’s no good, man, it’s frightening.”
A Glasgow-based youth worker says: “If there’s nothing in their communities, then they’re going to build a community digitally. When I was involved in violence, if you were going for a gang fight, you would whistle and you would shout in the hope that the other gang would hear you. Now it’s not like that – and that’s a direct consequence of social media.”
Similar concerns were raised in London, though some youth workers urged caution in placing too much emphasis on social media. As one said: “I don’t think it changes what the outcome would be … but I think the introduction of social media just means that you know where people are far quicker, and arranging certain things is a lot easier.”
Fraser says: “As we’ve learned from our interviews, this is a long-term challenge across the UK and we need to know more about how digital and street worlds interact. Most urgently, we need to find ways of building safe spaces both online and offline, and to do that we need learn from youth workers and young people – they are the experts.”
